Channeling Steve Sailer

When I first started writing my Steve Sailer column two weeks ago, I initially titled it “Channeling Steve Sailer.” Now I wish I had left it at that because his Sunday VDARE piece that appeared just after my essay really did seem like we were operating on the same wavelength. His essay was indeed perfectly timed as far as I was concerned.

Sailer’s piece, called Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberal? Not Good Enough, is a reflection on leading neocon Podhoretz’s book of the above name. And throughout, though Sailer advances into the no-go zone known as anti-Semitism, he is certainly right about what he wrote. For instance, he commits a foul (according to the imposed rules of discourse today) when he writes that Podhoretz’s book “is a combination of history of the last 2,000 years of Jewish victimization, voting analysis of 20th Century Presidential elections, and latest rendition of Podhoretz’s autobiography, all from a single, relentless perspective: Is it good for the Jews?”

Whew, that’s pushing it. I thought that was a bit too cavalier a reference to the suffering Jews have endured throughout their existence — all of it, of course, having nothing to do with any concrete Jewish behavior. Worse, however, is his thoroughly nontheological estimation of Podhoretz’s motivation: “Is it good for the Jews?”

Most of us know that even Jews sometimes point to this ethnic calculus for determining actions, but non-Jews are not normally given such a prerogative. Sailer, though, may well qualify for limited rights to make such quips if having one biological parent counts. As Sailer informs us, he was adopted and is now Catholic. And so far he hasn’t been arrested on hate crime charges.

What I really like, however, is a subtle amendment Sailer made to a claim by conservative Jewish writer Michael Medved. In September, Commentary magazine featured a symposium based on Podhoretz’s book called Why Are Jews Liberals? In it is found the source material for a quote Sailer took where Medved admitted that Jews hate Christianity:

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. … Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity … This political pattern reflects the fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and secularized community. …

Sailer made the telling change to Jewish “hostility toward Christians — anti-Chritianism, you might say.” Now it’s the people rather than the religion. That, of course, is far closer to the truth, for it is likely Jews would exhibit the same hatred of Whites no matter what religious veil we might adopt. We are not witnessing a fundamentally theological competition; rather, what we have is old-fashioned ethnic animosity and struggle.

And here’s where Sailer hits the nail firmly on the head:

What America can’t continue to afford is the pervasive unrealism imposed by the current code of silence about Jewish power and interests. Thus Jewish demonization of immigration reform patriots . . . is the single most important reason that America’s immigration disaster is still above criticism, long after it has become obvious that it is a disaster, and despite the fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are strongly opposed to it.

Absolutely. To remedy any of the problems American Whites face now — many of which involve Jewish activism over the last century (need I even refer to Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique on this point?) — we indeed have to forthrightly discuss Jewish power. But good luck trying, especially if you aren’t a Jew.

This “discouragement” of open discussion of Jewish power can be found across the gamut of mainstream life, from the well-funded offices of the ADL to editorial rooms in all the major news organs, to the offices of mainstream publishers, to the academics who staff our middling to great universities. The taboo is enforced: Do not discuss Jewish power.

Consider, for instance, how this ban exists around discussion of Jews in Hollywood, where the rule of thumb is simple, well-known, and vigorously enforced: A Jew may make note of it or explore it at length, but a non-Jew must remain silent on the issue. As Joe Sobran so succinctly put it in his Sobran’s Newsletter, (“The Buchanan Frenzy,” March 1996):

The full story of [Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. . . . Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.

William Cash, a young British journalist, ran head on into this barrier when in 1994 he wrote about the then-new Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen “Dream Team” that “in one respect at least this particular combination of talent, or ‘talent combo’ in the local argot, will start out on the right foot. Like the old mogul founders of the early studios—and unlike most other failed build-your-own studio merchants—they are Jewish.” Though he was defended by his Jewish editor, Dominic Lawson, young Cash still bore the brunt of a furious rebuke from American shores.

Marlon Brando made a similar mistake while appearing on “Larry King Live” by bluntly asserting that Jews run Hollywood and exploit stereotypes of minorities. “Hollywood is run by Jews, it is owned by Jews,” he began, and then went on to blame Jews for exploiting stereotypes of minorities, “but we never saw the kike because they know perfectly well that’s where you draw the wagons around.”

The topic of Jewish power in Hollywood is one of my favorites, and I write about it often.  Last Christmas I wrote in TOO that “the Jewish dominance of Hollywood is so obvious and undeniable that Los Angeles Times’ columnist Joel Stein recently made it official. What else can you say when all eight major film studios are run by Jews.” I’ve written on this theme extensively in The Occidental Quarterly (here—an editorial mix-up gave me the wrong name,  The Jews of Prime Time, and the ongoing series “Understanding Hollywood” 1, 2 [Spring 2009], and 3 [Summer 2009]).

Or you could read Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People, where the authors mock Gentile concern about the concentration of Jewish power in Hollywood. For instance, Chapter 8 is titled “Conspiracy Theories: Do Jews Control the World?” They then note that of the ten major Hollywood studios discussed, nine were created by Jews (Walt Disney being a Gentile) and all ten are run by Jews. “Conclusion: Yes, we do control the movie studios. All Jews please report to the World Conspiracy Headquarters immediately (don’t forget to bring your pass code).” They then do the same for TV networks, finding a leadership figure of seventy-five percent. Discussing print media, they find seven of ten major publications are run by Jews. “Conclusion: Jews have lots of opinions that they love to write about and charge you money to read!  Cool.”)

Playwright  David Mamet gets it just right, however, writing, “For those who have not been paying attention, this group [Ashkenazi Jews] constitutes, and has constituted since its earliest days, the bulk of America’s movie directors and studio heads.”

To his credit, Sailer has been consistent in focusing on Jewish power, as well as proffering reasons that Jews don’t want non-Jews to notice it. At the end September, for example, he wrote about the decline of the WASP (Last Of The Nice WASP Progressives) and rise of the Jew in America, and outlined the likely reason for Jewish insistence on not noticing differences among various groups of people.

Then in last week’s column, he addressed Jewish power again — and how that power is used to enforce certain manners of discourse:

Although political correctness is usually marketed on the grounds that we must protect Non-Asian Minorities from learning facts about themselves, the media figures actually doing most of the enforcing of political correctness tend to be members of a high average IQ group that seems to believe that the peasant majority will come for them with pitchforks if anybody smart ever clues them in on the facts about IQ. For example, only one of the Atlantic 50 ranking of most influential pundits is NAM, while half are Jewish. Jewish organizations have striven tirelessly to make Americans more poorly informed and more naive.

Indeed they have. After all, better to cloak the realities of power than discuss them openly.

In case writers need to be reminded, polymath John Derbyshire explains the ground rules when it comes to writing about Jews. First, he admits that any criticism of Jews may well spell career destruction. A while back, he made an excellent case for this risk in a remarkable exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com, asserting:

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

No wonder one of his exchanges about Jewish power was titled ”Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You: Criticizing Jews is professional suicide.”

In any case, let me again say that I am grateful to have access to a writer like Sailer, and I am pleased that his editor at VDARE, Peter Brimelow, as well as the Takimag crowd, allow Steve to write such needed prose. As usual, I’m looking forward to what next Sunday’s VDARE column will bring.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.